Intel researchers said this week that users will be able to control computing devices with brain waves by 2020. The company has partnered with Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh to decode human brain activity, and has used Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging machines to detect blood flow changes when humans see specific words and images. Intel-designed sensors would be implanted in users' brains. (Computerworld)

A security flaw in IE8 could make otherwise safe Web sites vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks, according to reports. The flaw is within a protection designed to prevent cross-site scripting attacks by rewriting Web pages with output encoding. Specifics about the vulnerability  haven’t been made public. Microsoft said it is investigating the flaw and isn't aware of any attacks that take advantage of it. (Register)

Google unveiled its Chrome OS at a press demonstration Thursday, showing off a system designed for netbooks that primarily uses the Chrome browser to run Web applications. The browser is used as the application-execution framework to keep processes isolated, and local storage is primarily used as a cache. The system will eventually include extensions, but they will be in HTML5 and Javascript, not binaries. (Information Week)

The US National Security Agency (NSA) helped Microsoft with development of Windows 7, according to an NSA official who testified before Congress on Wednesday.  Microsoft has denied speculation that it let the agency build backdoors into the OS for surveillance purposes. NSA information assurance director Richard Schaeffer told Congress that the agency lent its expertise to help Microsoft protect Windows against threats. The revelation led to privacy concerns about the agency’s role, which Microsoft vehemently denied. The company said government assistance was limited to Windows 7's Security Compliance Management Toolkit. (Computerworld)

New York state's Emergency Management Office is considering an alert system for game consoles that would accompany traditional emergency warnings over television and radio. The plan is meant to expand the alert system's reach to younger residents during disasters. Major consoles such as Playstation, Xbox, and Wii would be part of the system. (Information Week)

IBM is getting closer to simulating the human brain, and researchers from the company announced this week they have re-created a cat’s cerebral cortex. The simulation, which follows IBM’s simulation of a rat brain in 2007, operates 100 times slower than an actual cat brain, but offers scientists a glimpse at 1 billion neurons and 10 billion synapses working together. Researchers believe they will be able to fully simulate a human brain by 2019. (The Associated Press, CNet)

A Chinese court has ordered Microsoft to stop selling Windows XP in the country because the OS uses fonts that  infringe on copyrights held by a Chinese company. The court sided with Zhongyi Electronics, which  claimed that Microsoft had used its Chinese fonts in eight versions of its OS that weren’t part of the original licensing agreement. The ruling doesn’t apply to later versions of Windows, which didn't have the fonts. (Register)

The Pirate Bay has killed its BitTorrent tracker and will instead use a distributed hash tables (DHT) protocol to let users find files, setting up a decentralized system to find peers. Unlike the tracker, which hosted .torrent files, the DHT protocol queries networks to find torrents. The protocol requires more resources to operate and can cause router problems, but it gives The Pirate Bay better legal standing by letting the site claim it functions as a search engine. (Ars Technica)

A Japanese plan to build the world’s fastest supercomputer could collapse after a government panel recommended withholding funding for the project. The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research wants to create a supercomputer with a peak performance of 10 petaflops by 2011, a project that would cost 115 billion yen (US$1.3 billion). The fastest supercomputer currently operating is the Cray XT5 Jaguar at 1.75 petaflops. However, Japan’s Government Revitalization Unit said last week that the project seems unnecessary for the country and would have little benefit for its citizens. (PC World)

Some optical mice can be used to detect counterfeit euro coins, according to research by the University of Lleida. In a report in the journal Sensors, researchers wrote about a prototype program that uses mouse sensors to capture images from the common, European-map side of the coins, then compares the images to others from genuine coins. The sensors must be LED or infrared-based and be able to capture images at a minimum 15-by-15-pixel resolution. (Science Daily)